G20 REDUX: A FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS FESTIVAL Saturday, June 25, at Queen’s Park, 2-5 pm. Free. See listing.
Saturday hundreds of protestors will descend on Queen’s Park, the site of one of the most infamous scenes from the G20 Summit in which peaceful demonstrators were violently removed from the legislature’s designated free speech zone. They’re calling it G20 Redux.
One of the organizers of the protest is the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and we asked spokesperson Garham Norton to explain why it’s important to keep the pressure on one year after the summit.
What is your single biggest concern stemming from the G20?
The issue that is still of the greatest concern to us is the lack of a public inquiry. There are so many issues that stemmed out of that weekend. In our view none of the probes that have been called will be sufficient to address them, so we continue to call for a public inquiry and we think that call has only gotten more clear since time has gone on.
You’re not satisfied with the several different probes ongoing into the summit?
It’s not that we don’t have faith in them, but they’re all limited in what they can look at and how far they can go in their investigations. For instance the Toronto Police Services Board review has broad terms of reference, but it won’t answer questions about the OPP and the RCMP, or the other police forces.
I certainly don’t want to undermine the work that they’re doing, but we don’t think it will provide a comprehensive picture of what went wrong.
The G20 was a unique event, didn’t it warrant unique police tactics?
It certainly did warrant a different police response than your average weekend in Toronto. There were world leaders in town and there are very legitimate security concerns. Did the police go too far? Yes, in our view they did. Breaking up the protests at Queen’s Park, the types of force used against protesters, the detainments, and the searches. There are endless examples where the police exceeded what was warranted.
The police seem to be easing up on their defence of their conduct that weekend, with Chief Blair recently admitting mistakes were made and swearing off kettling. Is that encouraging for you?
We certainly welcome productive self-reflection by the police services. The Toronto Police board’s decision that they won’t kettle is certainly helpful and productive. There are some helpful things in Bill Blair’s recent report about policy and training, but in my view those things certainly don’t answer all the questions about the G20. You can train someone as much as you want but we have to look at why police weren’t complying with training they had received.
What type of inquiry does the CCLA want?
Given the different forces that participated in the security, what we would need would be a joint federal-provincial inquiry. Ideally they would both call one together, to look into what happened at the police level, the political level, and the intelligence level.
Do you think it’s realistic the Harper government will call an inquiry?
The clock is ticking and there haven’t been overwhelmingly positive signs, but inquiries aren’t always things that get called over night. So we remain hopeful that something could be done on that front, and that we will one day be given the answers.
Many people say that this sort of arbitrary treatment of citizens by the police is common, but usually it is directed at marginalized groups rather than middle class people like the G20 protesters. Is police action at the G20 simply part of a larger civil liberties issue here?
I think what happened during the G20 was a unique moment. That’s not to say that police don’t do thing they shouldn’t on a regular basis, and that may affect different communities disproportionately. But I think the sheer scale of what happened at the G20, with the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, at last count 1118 people, that’s bound to garner a lot of attention.
Is the rally Saturday simply to mark the anniversary of the summit, or to call for an inquiry?
A bit of both. The choice of Queen’s Park is somewhat symbolic because that was the place that was designated a free speech zone but the police didn’t treat it as such. It was aggressively cleared of protesters by the police. The event’s purpose is both to recognize the one-year anniversary and send a message that the public hasn’t forgotten about this and that the answers about what happened have still not been given.
